Independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone ridiculed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after he vowed on live television Friday that alleged Iranian death threats would not intimidate him.
Appearing on CNBC, Bessent confirmed reports that he had left his home for a military base on Secret Service instructions amid the U.S. war with Iran.
“F the Iranian leadership,” Bessent said, which Johnstone likened to a “little kid describing something he heard a grownup say.”
Bessent argued the threats showed that Operation Economic Outcast — Treasury’s campaign against those doing business with Iran, launched in August — is succeeding, and he compared Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to “a dangerous cornered animal.” He also noted that U.S. troops in the Gulf and President Donald Trump routinely face death threats. Tehran has denied plotting attacks against officials on U.S. soil, according to Arab News.
In an analysis published on Substack Friday night, Johnstone argued that it was “hilarious to see this mummified bureaucrat posturing as a tough guy for the cameras and acting like he’s being unjustly targeted by an evil regime.”
“You don’t get to start an unprovoked war of aggression, assassinate the leaders of a sovereign nation, massacre schoolchildren, deliberately target civilian infrastructure, deliberately immiserate the entire population with the goal of provoking civil war, and then posture as an innocent widdle victim if you get back what you dished out,” Johnstone wrote.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald issued a similarly brutal condemnation of Bessent’s commentary.
“Oh my god I started a war against a country and killed their leaders and blew up their schools and bridges and massacred their kids and now I am morally outraged that I feel [scared] and moved to a military base because of what they might do in response,” Greenwald mockingly wrote in a social media post on X.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Bessent credited U.S. sanctions with collapsing Iran’s economy, calling the effort “economic statecraft. No shots fired.” Weeks later, he told the Senate Banking Committee that Treasury had engineered a dollar shortage that tanked Iran’s currency and helped drive protesters into the streets. Iran’s crackdown on those protests left at least 7,000 people dead, NPR reported.
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